God and other things

I re-read the following extract from an email I wrote to a close friend about two-and-a-half months ago, which articulates my views on God and other things probably better than I have ever managed anywhere else - read, share and feel free to disagree:   

"I honestly believe that the shortest distance between two points always seems most appealing to people and even if you, individually, grow up to resent it, there isn't much of a chance you'll make other people think the same. And that's because taking the shortest, easiest route rather than a longer, more enriching one is a genuine dilemma - you'll wake up one day thinking you should pick one, you'll wake up another day convinced about the other. 

And given that most people have other things to worry about in a more immediate sense than the procedural propriety of their ways (and that's exactly what it is), they're more likely to fall on the easier side of the line. Which is why people always want disproportionately more than what they've worked for (or, in [my] eyes, deserve); which is why most peoples' lives ([mine] included) tends to be a constant exercise in finding a way around their limitations rather than embracing them.

If you push this line of thinking to its breaking point, someone in defence of the majority of people will say something to the effect of how a lot of our circumstances are either insurmountable or pre-ordained and therefore there's no harm or wrong in blaming circumstances (or explaining our shortcomings or failures with reference to circumstances). Now, I've searched for a long time for an effective counter to this and, at least vis-a-vis the "pre-ordained circumstances" part, I don't have an answer. Which is perhaps why belief in God or a supernatural entity is so common - it becomes this repository which we debit with all that we don't understand. 

That line you quoted ("whereas in earlier ages, religion led to a degree of fatalism, contemporary understanding pulls paradoxically towards an acceptance of risk but away from a tolerance of results when they occur") is extraordinary - not for how cynical it is, but for how unpolished and central an expression it is of what we think. Think about it - the earliest people who first started debiting the God account with everything they didn't understand would've noticed, over a period of time, that human development, especially science, started to chip away at that debit account and started to place more and more power with human reason. Assuming humans have not regressed significantly, it would seem to suggest that, at this point in human civilization, we know more about the world than humans before us did. Yet, stubbornly, we hold on to that earliest form of faith which taught us to attribute everything outside our control to God. And, naturally, we find it difficult to accept that things are often in our control because we just don't want to act on it.

But your other question - where do we go from here - is the harder one, of course. I think one thing we must do is keep questioning. It is what has brought us this far and it is, paradoxically, the reason why, today, we think we know less about the universe than anyone before us when, in fact, we know more. But alongside that questioning, we must arrive upon and stick by a settled core of meaning that we're comfortable with on most mornings when we wake up. You can make this settled core of meaning as narrow or as broad as you want - you could encompass religion, spiritual belief, self-belief, morals, ethics, values or any combination of them, if you want. 


My own experience has taught me that the larger your settled core of meaning, the more peace you see in the world around you. To me, that's the immediate benefit - I like feeling a sense of order around me and, in fact, I've grown to want it. The long-term instability/uncertainty, of course, is that I will often try to fit things into this picture that can't be fit. But that frustration, over the last couple of years or so in particular, has also come with the growing acceptance that there's no harm in admitting that there still are things about the universe that I don't understand. There's no shame in that whatsoever because to insist otherwise, I feel, would be to say that I've got it all figured out. And that, of course, doesn't agree with my settled core of meaning.

A lot of this struggle, predictably, will be with faith and what you believe in. I'm in no position whatsoever to prescribe anything to you, of course, but I did start feeling at some point that God must exist because there's just no point to existence otherwise. It's very emotive and it's very instinctive, but it hasn't let me down so far. :-)   

But to be entirely honest with you, I don't have answers. I'm only trying."