...Yeeeeah. Apparently the atheist critic in my head is still trolling strong. Hell, I haven't even gotten off the Brock Atheist Group on Facebook yet. I've been taught so strongly, fiercely even, to examine beliefs for flaws in logic - to slice and dice with Occam's Razor, the philosophy stating that any argument is stronger if it doesn't have to involve the supernatural - that I tend to fall back into that thought pattern quickly if I don't keep its opposite fresh in my mind. Since I didn't post anything for a while here, I've been drifting.
It's a danger. As soon as I get something written down, it's out of my head, as if I solved something about it even when I didn't.
So...
I'm coming at things from a different angle - again, one I touched on weeks ago. Despite the Razor neatly organizing many parts of my world, there are others that completely escape its touch. And maybe if I write them down, I can show them to my neocortex and be like, "See? You do believe in fairies. Now STFU."
(My apologies for the writing style of this one. It's not terribly late, and I've only been up for twelve hours, but I am terribly tired. Or headachey. Or something. But I'm not missing this opportunity to write.)
So, let's take a look at these 'irrational' beliefs - the things that survive despite that label because I know that they are so, no matter what logic says.
- My dad has seen ghosts. He once sat in the lap of a ghost, as a child. He picked up a hitchhiking ghost.
- Ghost, or possibly some other type of spirit, cats exist. They live in houses where cats have lived and been loved for years. I am not sure whether they are directly the spirits of the cats that lived and died there, or other spirit cats, or other forces which simply choose to take the form of cats for easy viewing.
- Poltergeists exist. They particularly enjoy hiding things that you sort of need right now, and that are going to piss you off if you can't find them, but that aren't essential to your survival. ...Probably. It's funny to see you get frustrated, not so funny to watch you freeze to death. The poltergeist will eventually return the item when it sees fit, which is only going to be some time after you give up on ever seeing the item again.
- Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. (Accepting this fact is part of the worship of Murphy.)
- I saw a fairy outside my window once. It was a little glowy yellow light, maybe... two inches across, based on the glance I got? It wasn't just out of the corner of my eye - but when I blinked, it was gone. I have no other explanation for what I saw. Besides...
- There are plenty of fairies in my parents' back garden, and that's where my bedroom window faced when I saw the fairy light.
- The basement that we used to live in had until recently been home to a very angry man, and the place was black with unpleasant energies. We had to cleanse it once or twice yearly, and I marked up a Norse protective rune (I think it was a World Tree, but I can't remember) above every entrance and window for good measure. Without these efforts, P and I spent sleepless nights huddled up, staring at the corners of the room in fear of some unnameable thing.
- Something came into my parents' house on, or with, the stuff inherited from my grandma Eve (which itself had come, barely touched, from my Great-Aunt Virginia). Or maybe it came off the nasty furniture moving guys who had come in for the day at about the same time. I suddenly couldn't sleep a night or two after it came in, and found myself drawn to look at the pile of stuff in the living room in the very late night... then suddenly had to book it (backwards) down the hall to my room and slam the door, and stuff the crack under my door so that 'it' couldn't get in. The fear was intense. Mom helped me do a banishing ritual the next morning, and... well, it was fine henceforth.
- All animals and trees have spirits. I can hug a tree, if it's the right tree and I'm in the right mood, and fit into it like it's hugging me back. I can feel... something, and it calms me down and roots me back into the soil where I belong. I try to remember to always thank the tree afterwards.
- Anything that is unique has a certain value; it has brought Dust - life - ness - into the universe. This is the stuff missing when things are too well organized, or too sterile, or too efficient; it is the opposite of barren. Efficiency can be endlessly reproduced, but something unique, once destroyed, can never be put back together quite the same... This includes people, animals, plants, books, movies, and even the way you arranged your bookshelf. It is stuff, 'information', and once lost it is gone. Thus, it is valuable. (If you haven't read the His Dark Materials series, the first book of which is The Golden Compass, you need to. Now! They're amazing, and they should probably get their own post here sometime. They're where the idea of Dust comes from.) I used to hate throwing out anything that had words or images on it and that wasn't obviously mass-produced.
- Good things will come back to you. Bad things will come back to you manyfold, although it may take a long time for it to show up. This is sort of like karma, but not exactly. Real karma is looking beyond the immediate rewards-punishments system this seems to be, and realizing that movement towards enlightenment leads to more comfortable lives and movement away from enlightenment leads to lives meant to teach a lesson. Thus, - I dunno, rapists are clearly not learning what they need to from this life, and their next life is probably going to suck because it's going to involve learning why rape is bad.
- This doesn't always sit easily with my belief in free will. I did an essay in the fall about free will and whether we have it. My conclusion was that the amount of free will we have is directly related to our ability to understand our own motives and foresee the consequences of our actions - to understand ourselves as complete beings in every dimension - and that because that is a very difficult feat, few to none of us have completely free will. ...Then again, maybe it does fit in just fine: gaining personal knowledge and control could be considered heading towards enlightenment, and full enlightenment grants full choice - including the choice not to be reborn. Damn, I just sorted out how predestination fits into free will! Am I good or am I good?
- Whether God, the Goddess, the God and Goddess, or the Gods are the same thing as this karmic force, or whether Their influence on us shows up as the workings of karma, I am not sure. I'm not well-read enough in either Hinduism or Buddhism to know for sure. I do remember something from Buddhism which considers even the Gods to be caught up in the cycle of life, death and rebirth, and that even they are not fully enlightened - if they were, they too could cease to worry, fear, and grieve. The Gods and Goddesses of antiquity certainly seem like they just have super-sized doses of anger, fear, grief and pain, rather than freedom from them.
- Something set the universe (multiverse?) going.
- Sometimes things just happen for no discernable cause.
- There are limits to human knowledge.
- Apparently, I believe in reincarnation.
- I also believe in an afterlife. I think its properties depend a lot on what you believe it to be (so if you think you're going to hell, you might end up treating yourself to a dose of punishment until you feel like you've been punished enough). I think it can fit in as another state of being; after a certain period of time, we might or might not be reborn again. I'm not sure whether this conflicts with the enlightenment theory or not; maybe we have to be sufficiently enlightened before we can choose whether to return or not. (Boddhisatvas, in one Buddhist tradition, are people who have reached enlightenment, but who have chosen to stay and help the rest of us get there. It's like they're holding the door open instead of going through themselves.)
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